SWAT 4 - The Stetchkov Syndicate Q&A - New Missions, New Weapons, New Enemies, More SWAT

Fans of realistic first-person shooters found a lot to like in SWAT 4, the latest chapter in the popular and realistic police series. Unlike most shooters, where your goal is to kill anything that moves, your job in SWAT is to serve and protect the citizenry. This also means trying to spare the criminals so they can answer to a court of law. So you're only supposed to use lethal force when you run out of options. As you'd expect, this resulted in a tense and exciting game in which you have to think and react differently. Now developer Irrational Games is working with publisher VU Games on the expansion for SWAT 4, due out early next year, and we chatted with VU Games producer Paul Pawlicki for the details.

The club level in SWAT 4 was one of the toughest missions in the game. This new club level could be just as challenging.

GameSpot: What is the Stetchkov Syndicate, and what role does it play in the expansion? Does the presence of a crime syndicate indicate more of a storyline connecting the missions, like SWAT 3? Or are the missions still fairly stand-alone in terms of story, like they were in SWAT 4?

Paul Pawlicki: The Stetchkovs are a crime family that has slowly infiltrated the city. They are gaining power and are responsible for an increase of guns and drugs on the streets. When the law is being broken the police are called in. When all hell breaks loose, the police call SWAT. That's where you come in. You resume your role as the commander of an elite SWAT team. You must eventually find the head of the Stetchkov crime family and bring order to chaos by any means necessary.

Here's the story behind the stand-alone missions. In the preproduction stages of SWAT 4 we talked to SWAT officers and learned that in their line of work each day on the job is different from the day before. The calls they get always require the same quick-thinking and tactical expertise, but rarely are they related to one another. Knowing this, we made a conscious decision to do the same thing in SWAT 4: create exciting missions that weren't necessarily tied to each other.

However, sometimes there is an event or series of events that over time has an increased affect on SWAT's workload. It may not appear that these events are connected right away, but put together a few clues and one might discover that there is a correlation. This is the route we chose to go with on the expansion pack. Some missions may not have anything to do with crime family, but others have a direct link back to the Stechkovs.

GS: Now that the game has been out for a while, and you've had a chance to interact with the fan community, what are the top three things that fans love about SWAT 4? And what are the top three things that they didn't like? How will you address these concerns in the expansion? And what other sorts of new features or gameplay improvements are you planning?

PP: There were many things that were well liked by the community and the reviewers alike, but if I had to pick three I would say less-lethal weapons, five-player cooperative multiplayer, and the easy-to-use interface.

Less-lethal weapons were a bit of a hard sell at first in a tactical first-person shooter like SWAT 4. The hard and fast rule is usually kill or be killed, but once people started playing multiplayer rounds with less-lethal weapons they found the pure joy that could only be had by pepper-balling some guy into submission and arresting him.

Some of the most fun to be had in SWAT 4 is playing the single-player missions with four of your buddies. Enemy placement is randomized, and this means that you could replay the same levels over and over and always have a different experience. We've increased co-op support to 10 players in the expansion pack.

SWAT 4 took a big step forward from its predecessor in regard to squad control, with an easy-to-use graphic command interface. The new interface allowed users to control their squad by simply clicking a mouse button. This made the game more accessible to a wider audience.

Now for the bad. This part is always difficult to answer. I mean, nobody likes to think their baby is ugly. Here are some of the things we know people didn't like plus the things we are doing to fix them in the expansion pack.

There was no ability to vote. One of the biggest complaints right away was that some people would come into a multiplayer game and start team killing or join a co-op game and be, well, less than cooperative. We did allow kicking and banning but that was only if you were logged into the server as the administrator. Now, during a multiplayer game, any of the players will be able to initiate a vote to kick and ban those problem players, change the map, or even the game mode.

There was no built-in voice communication. People wanted to be able to communicate with voice over IP. We agreed. SWAT 4 co-op benefits greatly from communication. Now there is built-in VOIP, which really adds to the fun.

And skins were too similar. Some people complained that our SWAT officers and the suspects' skins looked too similar in multiplayer, and they did. Now we've added a skin chooser that lets you drop in user-created textures and enable them in the multiplayer game.

Gesundheit!

GS: How will built-in voice communication be handled? We imagine that players will have to supply their own microphones.

PP: Yes, players will need their own microphone, but that's it. Then all they need to do is install the expansion pack and press a hotkey to talk to their teammates. It's just one of the many new features in the expansion pack. It really makes a huge difference when you are trying to work together as a team, especially now that we have increased the number of co-op teammates from five to 10.